November 26, 2014
"BRIGHT" LINES:
How Far Down Do You Define Deviancy in Ferguson? (Spengler, November 26th, 2014, PJ Media)
The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan's celebrated phrase "defining deviancy down" first appeared in a 1993 essay in The American Scholar. "I proffer the thesis," wrote Moynihan, "that, over the past generation...the amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can 'afford to recognize' and that, accordingly, we have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized."What used to be a civil rights movement has drawn a bright line behind the late Michael Brown, whose guilt in two violent felonies (robbing a convenience store while assaulting a store clerk, and assaulting a police officer) is not in dispute. It is sad, to be sure, that Brown died in a confrontation with a police officer, but no legal case can be made that the police officer rather than Brown chose to make the confrontation deadly.Two generations ago the NAACP chose Rosa Parks as the subject of its anti-segregation lawsuit in Montgomery, AL, because she was a woman of unexceptionable character and reputation. Today the NAACP and its allies have chosen Michael Brown as their poster-boy, precisely because he was a violent criminal. The argument of what now might be termed a "criminals' rights movement" is that the police should not have the right to use force against felons whose crimes do not reach a certain threshold.
I'm reading Rick Perlstein's new book, with its argument that in the late '60s/early '70s liberalism had won--chiefly the battle for Civil Rights and against American imperialism in Vietnam--and a unique opportunity existed for us to recognize the evils of our culture, but that Ronald Reagan snatched victory for traditional values from the jaws of this defeat. But Friend Perlstein is to honest for his own good and his own portrayal of the era is so dark and disturbing that it makes it impossible too see why Americans would have ever been willing to accept this liberal apogee as the new normal.
Consider, the newly civil-righted proceeded to riot and burn down their own neighborhoods a few years later and the newly "liberated" Vietnamese piled into boats by their hundreds of thousands to escape to America.
How are you going to convince white middle America that we're the biggest problem black people face when you destroy your ownneighborhood in a show of solidarity with a hoodlum?
Posted by Orrin Judd at November 26, 2014 4:54 PM
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